In-Flight Performance of PARASOL Inside the Aqua-Train Atmospheric Observatory

Details In-Flight Performance of PARASOL Inside the Aqua-Train Atmospheric Observatory In-Flight Performance of PARASOL Inside the Aqua-Train Atmospheric Observatory

Dec 2005

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2005agufm.a33c0915f&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2005, abstract #A33C-0915

Physics

Optics

0545 Modeling (4255), 0694 Instruments And Techniques, 1610 Atmosphere (0315, 0325), 3360 Remote Sensing

Scientific paper

PARASOL, Polarization and Anisotropy of Reflectances for Atmospheric Sciences coupled with Observations from a Lidar, launched the 18th December 2004, is a microsatellite developed by the Franch Space Agency (CNES) carrying a wide-field of view imaging radiometer called POLDER and designed in partnership with the Atmospheric Optics Laboratory (LOA). The PARASOL instrument analyses a threefold signature : polarization, for different viewing angles and for 9 spectral bands from visible to near-infrared. In addition, PARASOL scientific goals are to improve the characterization of microphysical properties of clouds and aerosols using the complementary data provided by sensors composing the Afternoon-train observatory (MODIS, CALIPSO, CLOUDSAT). During the image quality commissioning phase, ended in June 2005, activities were conducted to complete in-flight geometric and radiometric calibration and evaluate the system performance regarding to mission specifications and scientific goals. Massive correlations between various images were used to assessed the in-flight geometric calibration and registration performances between polarized, spectral, and multi-directional observations which were found to be compatible with specifications, i.e. better than 0.05, 0.10, and 0.10 pixel respectively. The absolute location accuracy was estimated at 2-3km (note that pixel of the level-1 data grid are 6.18km). The in-flight radiometric calibration activity includes various aspects : absolute, multi-temporal, multi-angular and in-polarization calibrations, dark current and non-linearity characterization, optimization of the dynamic range. Because of the absence of on-board calibration device, these characterizations were assessed through methods based on acquisitions over well-defined natural targets : i/ Rayleigh scattering over predefined oceanic sites, ii/ spectrally flat sunglint over ocean, iii/ bright, high and spectrally flat convective clouds, iv/ pre-defined and well-characterized desert sites. The resulting absolute calibration accuracy is estimated at better than 3% while the interband calibration accuracy is nearly 1% from 490 to 1020nm At the exception of 2 open issues (a stray-light contamination leading to degraded performances at 443-nm, and a geometric performance slightly degraded 3 days per month during transits of the moon into the field-of-view of the star-tracker), performances are found to be very satisfactory, the quality of PARASOL level-1 data is now guaranteed for a full scientific exploitation.

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